Stem cells sought for Montreal woman battling leukemia

MONTREAL — A 34-year-old Montreal woman of Vietnamese and Filipino origin is urgently in need of a stem cell transplant in the coming weeks to survive leukemia. Mai Duong, a mother of one, suffered a relapse of leukemia in May and requires a compatible bone marrow or umbilical cord stem cell donor. She is undergoing chemotherapy at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital.

A 34-year-old Montreal woman of Vietnamese descent talks of her urgent need of a stem cell transplant in the coming weeks to survive leukemia. Mai Duong, a mother of one, suffered a relapse of leukemia in May and requires a compatible bone marrow or umbilical cord stem cell donor.

In hospital after a relapse of leukemia in May, Mai Duong, a Montrealer of Vietnamese descent, was told by her doctors that she would soon need a stem cell transplant. Finding a match wouldn’t be easy, they said, because there is a dearth of compatible Asian donors in Quebec and worldwide. But Duong wasn’t content to sit and wait in her hospital bed.

“Instead of not doing anything, I told myself this is going to be a fight and this is going to be a fight that everybody is going to know,” she said.

In a video explaining her situation, Duong said she is having difficulty finding a comparable donor because “ethnic groups are under-represented in the international (stem cell donor) registry. It seems we don’t give out our stem cells and this is a huge problem.”

In Quebec, fewer than 0.5 per cent of the 47,000 registered stem cell donors are of Asian descent, Laurent-Paul Ménard, a spokesperson for Héma-Québec, said.

There is no registry in Vietnam.

“On the international level, there’s a similar problem because we’re talking about 1.9 per cent of (Asian) donors in the American registry and 0.9 per cent in the international registry,” he added.

“There is a really important need for (donor) recruitment in the Asian community.”

Dr. Gizelle Popradi, a hematologist who runs the MUHC stem cell transplant program, said patients who are not Caucasian are at a disadvantage because of the lack of well-matched registered donors. Is it a crisis? “It all depends on your perspective,” she said. “If you are that one person who needs a transplant and you can’t find a donor because people like you aren’t represented on the registry, then sure it’s a crisis.”

As an advertising and communications professional, Duong knew how to spread the word — fast. She sent out an international SOS through social media and her own website. She gave interviews to a U.S.-based Vietnamese television channel and local media. She reached out to the 150,000-strong Vietnamese community in Canada — not just for her own sake, but for all others in a similar situation.

“A lot of people don’t have that media exposure and they still need a transplant,” she said. “I hope this will save my life, for sure, but I’m happy it will save many lives.

“My doctors are happy, too,” she added. “They tell me this is a global problem that they’ve been trying to tackle for years.”

Messages of support have been flooding in from around the world and stem cell swab drives have been held in the Canada, the U.S., Switzerland and Vietnam. Now, Duong said, she is hopeful of finding that elusive stem cell donor who shares her genetic makeup.

On Monday, Duong said she wasn’t running a fever or experiencing any side effects from the chemotherapy needed to keep her cancer at bay. But her health is unpredictable. “There are a lot of unknowns,” she said. “My immune system is still at zero. I’m living day-by-day.”

Duong was first diagnosed with leukemia in January 2013 when she was 15-weeks pregnant. Her pregnancy had to be terminated and she underwent a month of intensive chemotherapy.

After her treatment, she was in “tip top shape,” she said. Neither she nor her doctor expected the cancer to return. Now that it has, she is going through another round of chemotherapy in isolation. While in hospital, Duong is doing her best to be a virtual mom to her 4-year-old daughter, Alice. They usually communicate twice a day, once in the morning and again at night, via iPhone.

“We Facetime a lot,” she said. “I try to discipline her over the phone. Don’t do this, don’t do that.

“I try to reason with her” to take a bath, for example, she said. “But it’s really difficult when I’m just a screen.”

It’s difficult to think of the future, but Duong says she has one thing one her mind. “I just want to get home and play with my daughter. That’s my only plan,” she said.

For more information, including instructions on how to become a donor, visit http://sosmai.com.

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